


Touch

by DarlaBlack



Series: Ficlets & Prompt Responses [10]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 04:47:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19881889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: Prompt: Mulder finally touching Scully’s bare skin after years of touching her clothes.





	Touch

There was a time that he only let himself love her while she slept. It began in 1994, when he was guilt-ridden and hollow-cheeked at her bedside, after her sister had chastised him into confessing to her dying form. His face would have told her what his words could not yet say, but she never saw. In those early days, he would sometimes touch her hand, or when her father died, a cheek, but that was the only Scully skin he knew. More familiar was the warmth of her back through a suit jacket, or her shoulder pressed to his bicep, occasionally the weight of her head on his shoulder as she slept beside him on a plane. He would watch her then, too, and allow himself the full flood of his tenderness for her.

When her bones were too prominent under that jacket, he craved more of her: encircling arms and the feel of her hair, her face, under his fingertips. He loved her wholly when it was safe—when she couldn’t see his eyes. He’d watched her slipping away, and still he couldn’t bring himself to let her know all of what he felt.

“What are you thinking?” She asks.

Her eyes are closed now, too, but there’s a smile on her face. She is naked, face down on his mattress, and his fingers travel across all of her skin that had been so long denied him. He touches her back, connecting the dots of four small moles, and dragging the pad his middle finger up the groove of her spine. He slips a hand below the lip of the sheet to cup the swell of her bottom.

“I’m thinking…” he says. “How happy I am that I get to touch you now. How all of this—“ he leans over to kiss her shoulder. “All of this used to be off limits.”

“Hmm.” She rolls onto her hip and turns her head to look at him. “You thought it was off limits?”

He cracks a grin. “Wasn’t it?”

She gives him a secret smile and rolls back over. She tucks her hand beneath her cheek and he wonders how long ago the realization came to her.

“Hey,” he says. He scoots, settles his weight atop her so their skin is touching along their lengths. Her toes curl around his calves. “Wasn’t it?”

She chuckles and he feels it under his chest. “Maybe for you it needed to be.”

He considers her words while he presses his lips to the top of her head, breathes the smell of her scalp. “You would have let me touch you? Even early on?”

She pushes up, signaling him to give her room, so he does and she rolls onto her back. She looks up at him and runs a thumb along his stubbled jaw. Solemn, she nods. “I would have,” she says, “but you weren’t ready.”

He thinks about this, thinks about who he was in those early days—so driven, so grave, so myopic. He knows she is right. He kisses the freckled ridge of her nose. “But I’m ready now,” he assures her.

She wiggles, and her thighs come up on either side of his hips. There’s so much love in her eyes. She tugs his face down to press his lips to hers. “Good.”


End file.
